Instant gratification is the norm. Consumers expect faster access to relevant content online—especially from mobile devices. Page speed and mobile optimization can impact the position of your dental website’s content link in search engine results pages (SERPs). Now, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program can help increase your website’s load speed and improve its user experience (UX).
According to Google, 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. However, the average page load speed for mobile content is atleast 8 seconds! Slow page load speeds impair UX in a big way. Your patients don’t want to and don’t expect to wait around forever for a page or an article to load on their mobile devices.
This is where Google AMP comes in. The AMP program is Google’s latest attempt at fixing this issue and pushing for improved mobile web UX. If your site is fast and your dental content is AMP optimized, the chances of it being viewed and clicked on can improve dramatically.
Mobile technology is all about moving forward. Any kind of search advantage on mobile devices is a must for dental practices that want to make their mark in today’s ultra-competitive market. Faster search means mobile users won’t leave your dental site for your competitors.
Benefits for Dental Practices
The mobile web is set to get bigger. The biggest indication of this is how Google has been rewarding mobile-friendly web pages with higher search rankings since last year. And now with AMP pushing for improved UX, web pages will get an even bigger boost.
Potential patients not only will be able to easily find relevant dental content at the top of search pages, they also will be able to access the information much faster. Speed and easy access to relevant content for mobile and tablet users is what Google AMP aims to achieve. The advantage for your dental practice is improved interactions on site pages, which in turn can result in your pages getting a boost in SERPs.
AMP moves away from how traditional mobile content is delivered. The three elements of AMP include:
- AMP HTML: This updated set of custom AMP-related commands essentially cuts and trims the frills or dead weight such as third-party JavaScript and website tracking cookies, which otherwise add bulk to mobile content.
- AMP JS: This new but very limited JavaScript file for mobile pages supports the loading of external resources asynchronously. Anything extra apart from the actual text and images in the content gets loaded last.
- AMP Content Delivery Network (CDN): As Google’s network of servers, the AMP CDN organizes and caches AMP-optimized content for quicker delivery. Regardless of where a page is requested from or where a publisher’s server is located, the AMP CDN will ensure that a pre-rendered, AMP-optimized copy of the content is available on servers close to or within the region that the request came from, leading to faster delivery.
AMP’s core function is to help create simpler pages that are less data intensive to speed up the mobile web. So while AMP websites serve content that is basic in both text and images, they benefit from a dramatic increase in page load speeds.
SEO & Digital Marketing
Faster-loading content is crucial if you want potential patients to keep coming back. And AMP offers speed by way of SEO advantages. Faster page-load speed means more page views, increased sharing, and more brand engagement via your dental content.
AMP content is featured at the top of Google searches in a swipeable carousel. All AMP-optimized articles come with a thunderbolt icon indicating they are AMP enabled. And because AMP is open source and anyone can pitch in on how to improve its feature set to make it more publishing friendly, new and improved changes to AMP can be expected in the near future. This would include a change in how AMP-optimized content appears in SERPs.
Another big aspect of mobile optimization is faster page-load speed. Most mobile readers will leave a page in frustration and never come back if it takes too long to load. AMP will help reduce bounce rates since readers will be able to quickly access pages and content of interest.
Also, most mobile users who view AMP-optimized content tend to click back to the SERP to pick up other relevant content. This behavior can lead to a healthy impact on the number of paid search impressions over a certain period of time.
Plus, the longer your mobile page takes to load, the higher are the chances that it will impact your conversion rates. This can be true even for users who have previously engaged with your brand and were otherwise happy with their experience. If potential patients can access your content quickly and in their moment of need, they will not only be more inclined to coming back for more but also be more ready to buy what you are selling.
Finally, AMP content offers wider reach benefits as readers can access content easily and more widely by clicking on it in Google SERPs. Not only does Google process over 3.5 billion searches per day, but mobile users outpace desktop users, which obviously translates into greater reach. Furthermore, anyone who is keen on learning can pick up on the guidelines of formatting content for quick and easy viewing by a wider base of readers.
Conclusion
AMP should be a priority for everyone. Although AMP is not yet a ranking factor, page-load speed and mobile optimization are proving to be heavyweights when it comes to search ranking. Google is pushing for a faster mobile web, which means dental practices with a digital presence will have to carefully and quickly consider AMP a priority.
Naren Arulrajah is president and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education, and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of more than 140 full-time marketers, Ekwa helps dentists who know where they want to go get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.
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